


Object Permanence

by ArwenLune



Series: Object Permanence [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Community: avengerkink, Gen, Natasha Feels, Natasha Needs a Hug, Natasha's Early Days At SHIELD, Nick Fury Feels, POV Nick Fury, Phil Coulson & Nick Fury Friendship, warning: oblique references to past abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-03-04
Packaged: 2018-01-12 23:17:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1204189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArwenLune/pseuds/ArwenLune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha has been with SHIELD for eight months, and she is functioning well on missions, but she's not exactly thriving outside of them. Coulson thinks this is something Fury can - and should - help with. Possibly this should involve truck stop diner food. </p><p>A fill of my own prompt on <a href="http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/18271.html?thread=41932895#t41932895">AvengerKink</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My own prompt was so detailed, I didn't think anybody else was going to write it either. Then I was looking for distraction from bad life stuff and there it was.

"Are you saying she's not doing well? Because the reports--"

"She is doing very well professionally. Disciplined, decidicated, highly skilled. Everything we hoped for when Barton brought her in. But she's been here eight months and the only reason she isn't living out of a suitcase is that she doesn't _have_ a suitcase," Coulson said, feeling a little frustrated and not bothering to hide it. Not from Nick Fury, not when it was just the two of them in an office. "I think the only thing she owns that we didn't issue her is a coffee mug, and Barton gave it to her."

"She's allowed time off to go acquire things of her own, as long as she wears a tracker or Barton is with her. I don't see the problem," Fury said, eye skimming over the latest Team Delta mission reports. Trying to find what had Coulson worried. Romanov's missions so far had been impressive; she thought on her feet, worked quickly and neatly, didn't take undue risks, and was much more likely to follow directions than Barton was. Not just directions from Coulson; Sitwell had been positive about her too.

Some agents apparently found her 'creepy' but well, that wasn't Fury's problem. Her only weak point was that she wasn't used to working with a team, wasn't used to trusting them to back her up, and if they weren't on the ball enough to her mind she was already improvising.

Romanov's latest round of psych evals had looked okay too, though perhaps the words 'coping mechanisms appropriate to the circumstances' should have drawn his attention more. Then again, he had little doubt that somebody as skilled at subterfuge as she was could make a psych eval have any damn outcome she pleased.

"It's not about shopping. It's about her failing to put down any kind of roots. She's living like- well, like I assume she lived when working for the Red Room. Not a person, just an asset. No possessions, nothing personal, don't talk to anyone, don't bother to get attached to anything or anyone, because it can all be taken away in a moment."

Fury focused his full attention on Coulson, frowning.  
"SHIELD isn't like that."

"And I have told her, but it isn't getting through. I don't think she has any concept of what we mean when we say she's working for the good guys now, so she's just sticking with what she knows."

"Which is assuming we're like the Red Room?" Fury tried not to be insulted. They'd seen enough about the Red Room – and she'd told them enough – that he felt very comfortable declaring SHIELD the good guys compared to them.

"My point is that if she's expecting us to drop her the moment we've decided she isn't useful or worth the effort, that could be a real problem when a mission goes South."

"If you're expecting to be betrayed, I suppose it wouldn't take much more than an aborted extraction or a round of bad intel to get your evidence," Fury mused. "And we know how dangerous she is when she doesn't think she has anything to lose. All right, I see your point. What do you propose to do about it, if telling her doesn't work?"

"Do you remember when I'd first gotten Barton assigned to me?"

"I remember the long list of grievances against him and the equally long list of handlers who'd either dumped him, or just plain refused to take him on."

"He didn't trust anybody, but why should he? Nobody trusted him."

"So you took him on a tour of truck stop diners," Fury remembered with the twitch of a grin. Everybody had assumed that choice had been for Barton's sake, but Fury knew how much Coulson liked greasy spoon food.

"He needed to see that I considered him more than an asset, that he was a person to me, before he could trust me. Diner food was just the side effect of that."

"Uh-huh. So you want to do the same with Romanov?"

"No, I think you should."

Fury raised his eyebrow at his friend.

"Why me? She's your asset."

"But you're the one who told her you didn't believe she was truly on our side, and that you'd be keeping a close eye on her."

"I was," Fury conceded. He hadn't believed at all that she truly wanted to defect, and he'd been pissed off with Barton for falling for her tricks so easily. Even Phil, who was supposed to know better, had gone along with it. Fury had felt like he needed to be the last vestige of good sense and judgement.

She'd since disproven him. Had done everything they asked – and more – and given them everything she knew about the red Room and several other high profile targets. Moreover, he'd asked Xavier to send over somebody to evaluate her and the mindreader had declared that Romanov wasn't hiding anything or running some kind of long con.

Truth be told, Fury just didn't like Romanov very much. The kind of missions she excelled at were the kind of missions he'd always refused to use his female agents for, even when it was the easiest way. Chatting somebody up was one thing. Clothes needing to come off in the line of duty wasn't something he was willing to live with. When that subject had come up she hadn't even faked an understanding of why he wouldn't authorise what she was proposing, and he thought she might even have been annoyed.

It was just... something about the way she looked at him. It made him uncomfortable, and being made uncomfortable by one of his agents was a novel and decidedly unwelcome experience.

"I might be on the other side of the radio on ops, but you're the Director," Phil continued. "To her mind, you're the one with her life in your hand, ready to snuff it out the moment she isn't useful, or isn't worth the effort to extract her."

"Right. You're saying I should go eat crappy diner food with Romanov. Figuratively."

 

Fury gave the matter some thought. He didn't think just taking her somewhere – a bar? Walk in the park? - would go over well. He couldn't expect this to be a quick fix; if he'd learned anything about her it was that she needed a good long run-up before she trusted anybody. Even Barton – it turned out she'd run into him several times over the course of the past few years.

He finally assigned her as his escort to a dinner with fellow members of a long-disbanded intelligence community initiative. The dinner would be an informal social occasion; barely a mission at all, but having her there meant he could forgo a security detail. It was softball, but given that the most time he'd ever spent with her had been in an interrogation room after she'd surrendered herself to SHIELD –- "If you fuck this up, Ms Romanov, there's not going to be a nice pension and a house in the country" -- he thought it was a good place to start.

 

He'd sent her to the umbiquitous 'Equipment' department (which supplied everything from tactical gear to staplers to undercover mission clothing and props) for clothing and accessoiries. She reported to his office in a stylish black dress that struck the right balance between alluring and classy. She wore it with a thin maroon belt, and he almost laughed, because Yu-jin, the woman in charge of mission clothing, clearly knew him too well.

He wore a dark maroon shirt under a casual black sports coat, and he'd done away with the eyepatch. Instead he wore his eye prosthetic and the heavy-rimmed glasses that mostly hid the scarring around his eye. There were advantages to what Coulson blandly referred to as 'the post-apocalyptic pirate look' – image being only one of them, the eyepatch was also much more comfortable – but sometimes it paid to blend in a little.

Hardly anybody within SHIELD ever saw him like this, but the only sign of surprise Romanov showed was a slight tilt of her head and an assessing glance. He knew she wasn't showing him anything she didn't want him to see, but he thought he passed muster by whatever standards former Russian spies had for dinner attire. The thought made him grin a little.

 

She didn't say anything in the car. That would normally be okay – Fury wasn't exactly one for idle conversation either – but he got the sense that she was uncomfortable.

"You okay with this thing tonight?"

"Yes, sir," she said immediately. Automatically. That really told him nothing

A few minutes later she glanced at him, looked back through the windshield, and then asked in a soft, even tone, "Who am I tonight, sir?"

Huh.

"You're one of my agents, and my company for the night."

Her lips pressed together briefly, then her face went blank again. He almost asked 'Is that a problem?' but remembered in time that with somebody like her, those challenging words would ensure that if there _was_ a problem, he would definitely not ever be informed of it.

"I would... prefer clear parameters, sir," she said, with the kind of cautious wording that screamed for his attention.

"In what way?" he tried to draw her out.

"Your expectations of me for this mission are... not fully clear to me, sir," she said after a long moment. And-- oh. She was afraid to fail. Her mission reports spoke of somebody who was willing to bend the laws of physics to fullfill mission goals, but that did require her to know what constituted success and what failure.

He almost said 'It's casual, just be yourself' and then spotted the problem with that. With what he knew of her life until she joined SHIELD, she might never have done anything like this outside of a mission.

"You're used to having a character to get into, a cover?"

Her careful nod somehow managed to communicate that that was obvious.

"All I need from you is your company, and in the unlikely event that shit hits fans, for you to have my back." He considered for a moment. The purpose of the whole thing was for her to see that he trusted her. "If it helps you to do that as somebody else than Natasha Romanov, then figure out who you are tonight and let me know how to introduce you."

She actually blinked in surprise, which was a startled gasp from anybody else. She clearly hadn't expected to get free rein.

 

Ella Gruszynski," she said, a couple of miles further along. "I'm a junior field agent, just transferred up from LA."

Her voice had taken on the slightest hint of a Valley accent; subtle enough to confirm the former location without a hint of suspicion, but not too much for an agent.

Fury tilted his head.

"Works for me." He took his right hand off the wheel to offer it to her. "Nick Fury. Director. Formerly of all over the fucking place. I needed an escort for tonight and your handler informed me you deserved a softball after the shitshovelling you've been doing lately."

She shook his hand with an open, amused smile at the gesture, and he tried to hide how impressed he was with the complete shift in demeanor. He'd been driving with a silent, wary former Red room spy in the passenger seat. Now there was just a young woman, poised enough to be a field agent, but the kind of person you could imagine might miss a dog she'd left with her parents in LA.

Fury was impressed. And very, very slightly pertubed by how fluid and complete the shift had been.

 

The dinner went well. Ella Gruszynski made polite and appropriate conversation, and charmed their half of the table with a tale about cooking on a field mission and the hazards of trying to substitute with local ingredients that 'sort of looked like the originals'. It just so happened that Nick had his own experiences on this subject, and the evening passed in a unanimiously agreed-upon ban on shop talk.

(Except for the brief exchange he had with a former colleague, who passed him the information about WSC members he'd been hoping for.)

 

Romanov shed Ella somewhere between getting in the car and when Nick turned the car onto the motorway. He couldn't pinpoint it, but at some point she was her own wary self again, leaning against the passenger door a little in a way that had looked casual as Ella, but was, he thought, mostly to make space between them.

"Nice work, Romanov," he said, tossing the glasses into the middle console. He idly wished he'd brought his eyepatch, so he could take the prosthetic out. It was beginning to ache. 

He saw her slight, accepting nod, and that was it for conversation on the way back. He tried once to get her talking about field cooking, but it was like pulling teeth, so he left it.

When the lift arrived on the floor that held her quarters, he wished her a good night and pushed the button for his own, higher floor. As the doors closed between them, she turned back to stare, and he thought he saw her blink in surprise.

Oh. 

If there hadn't been cameras, he might have facepalmed at the sudden realisation. _Expectations_. He was the man she thought held her life in his hands. The man she had no better frame of reference for than her experiences in the Red Room.

He'd been careful to avoid the suggestion that she was more than his colleague, both to her and to their dinner companions. Hadn't touched her beyond what politeness dictated – helping her into her coat, sliding her chair in at the table. She'd still apparently though that she was expected to entertain him in private afterward.

"Fuck," he muttered to himself. Obviously Operation 'Turn the Black Widow Into A Fully Rounded Human Being' needed some more thought.


	2. Chapter 2

"You are diabolical," Phil Coulson said as soon as he'd closed the door to Fury's office behind him. "And possibly also deranged."

Nick Fury flashed him a wide, slightly manic grin.

"Did you really just have Finance drop 401k paperwork on Romanoff's head?"

"I believe I did."

"You do realise she needed to have explained to her what a pension even _is_ , right?"

"I was kind of counting on it."

"And that Baroukel, the poor guy who just spent half a day trying to talk her through the paperwork, is having a nervous breakdown?"

"I thought I employed people who were more resilient than that," Fury mused. "How did it go over with her?"

"I think the concept is going to need some time to sink in," Phil said. "I'm fairly sure this is the first time anybody has ever even suggested that she might make it to retirement age."

Fury nodded.  
"I didn't want to have a sit down talk about how she's a real agent now. Didn't think that would make her feel better about things, so I thought I'd let the paperwork do the talking."

"She's been asking some very careful questions about that little mission last week. What sort of test it was, and how she'd know if she passed."

"I guess today's paperwork answered most of that, then."

Phil gave him a look that was maybe mildly impressed with the efficiency of the strategy, and Fury grinned. He planned to take Romanoff on a few more missions, and he himself had a rare field mission coming up that Team Delta would be a good fit for. Romanoff was going to be OK.

**Author's Note:**

> I kind of want to say I'll write more of this, but I am just as stumped about how to move from here as Fury is! If you have ideas, I'd love to hear them in the comments :-)


End file.
